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Pan Ams' Waneek Horn-Miller an Oka Crisis survivor

For elite athlete Waneek Horn-Miller, life has always been about sport.

So it’s fitting, she says, that after surviving a near-fatal stab wound during the Oka Crisis — which interrupted her athletic career but ultimately spurred her to compete even harder — she is marking the 25th anniversary of that conflict’s July 11 beginning at the Pan Am Games.

Also fitting because Horn-Miller, a Mohawk, marked the 10th anniversary of Oka at the Sydney Olympics where she was co-captain of Canada’s water polo team.

“I know what (sport) can do for young women and young men,” says Horn-Miller, 39, who is serving as Team Canada’s assistant chef de mission for the games.

“And that’s my effort to combat the murdered and missing woman. That’s my effort to combat substance abuse. That’s my effort to help with mental health. To create a sports system within Canada for indigenous people. And get more of them to this level and support their efforts.”

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The Oka crisis, the violent 1990 clash between Mohawks and Quebec provincial police over disputed land, cast an international spotlight on this country’s unwillingness to deal with land claims and treaty rights.

The dispute began after officials in the town of Oka voted to build condominiums and expand a golf course into a pine forest and burial land that Mohawks — living on the reserve of Kanesatake west of Montreal — had always claimed as their own. Reserve members who called themselves Mohawk Warriors blocked a little-used road leading to the golf course, ignoring a court injunction to stand down.

It was four months before the Quebec police stormed the barricade on July 11. The botched raid escalated to violence, and Cpl. Marcel Lemay died in the shootout.

The military moved in a month later and encircled the encampment on the reserve with a ring of barbed wire. What followed was a standoff with the Mohawks taking refuge in a residential treatment centre for drugs and alcohol.

“It was a tense and volatile environment,” says Horn-Miller, who, as a 14-year-old, was there for three weeks during the standoff. “Every movement we made we had hundreds of guns pointed as us…It was traumatizing.”

Horn-Miller’s job was to cook the midnight meal as well as breakfast and take it to the Warriors, who were holed up in bunkers.

On Sept. 26, the day an end the standoff was negotiated, the teenager was leaving the treatment centre in Kanesatake carrying her 4-year-old sister, Kaniehtiio, when she was stabbed close to the heart by a soldier carrying a bayonet.

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Horn-Miller later launched a human rights complaint but was unsuccessful because, she says, she was unable to identify the soldier.

Her mother, Kahn-Tineta Horn, a prominent native rights activist in the ’60s, was one of more than 50 Mohawks charged with participating in a riot and obstructing the military and the Quebec provincial police. Only a handful were convicted and only one person went to jail.

At Oka, construction of the golf course and condominiums was cancelled after the federal government bought part of the land, but ownership was never transferred to the Kanesatake Mohawk.

Horn-Miller says that after the stabbing she considered quitting sport, but the values her mother had instilled in her made that impossible.

Her single mom had years earlier moved the family from the Kahnawake Reserve, near Kanesatake, and into an apartment in Ottawa across from the YMCA. Any extra money she had paid sports.

“She always told us she didn’t care what we do,” says Horn-Miller, “just do it to the best of your best ability. She never raised us as native kids, understanding the limitations — the statistics — that we were up against as native women.”

After the stabbing her mother told her, “I never raised you to be anybody’s victim,” Horn-Miller recalls. “It was exactly what I needed to hear because if I had given up then I would be giving up my dream to that person who stabbed me.”

Horn-Miller, a provincial swimming champ at 13, went on to win gold in water polo at the Winnipeg Pan Am Games in 1999.

She is now married to Keith Morgan, a four-time Olympian in judo who is doing his residency in family medicine in Ottawa. She has two older sisters, one a doctor, the other a professor. The sister she was carrying that night, Kaniehtiio Horn, is a Gemini-nominated actress.

“Every time I wanted to quit I would envision my little sister’s face and say, ‘I’m not going to quit for her,’ ” says Horn-Miller.

Horn-Miller, who retired as an athlete in 2008, is the host of her own health and wellness show on the ATPN network and tours the country as a motivational speaker.

She says one of the results of the Oka crisis was an awareness of Aboriginal issues, especially land claims. A Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, created in the wake of the conflict, journeyed to more than 100 communities. “It was almost like Canada needed to be shaken awake … because really, before Oka not many people knew about native issues. And for 78 days, it made the front page of every newspaper and it was front-lining every newscast. So Canadians couldn’t say, ‘What is that?’ ”

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